João de Melo

The Azores may “exist to most Americans only as mid-Atlantic flecks on a map,�€? as Katherine Vaz puts it in her introduction to My World Is Not of This Kingdom, but the tiny islands speak with a loud voice through their representative, João de Melo. His 1980s novel has been newly translated for an anglophone audience that will be pleased to add the archipelago to a literary atlas that includes García Márquez’s Macondo and Fuentes’s Mexico. My World is in effect a founding myth for the Azores, and it has an appropriately primal tone, with language marked by power and portent. Its characters are outsized, notably Mayor Guilherme Jose Bento, “better known by the name of ‘Goraz,’ elephant fish, because of his bulging red eyes,â€? who kills a horse with a single blow, successfully battles nine knife-wielding assailants, and terrorizes his townspeople. His oppression is just one of many thumbs under which most of de Melo’s figures squirm; they must answer to political and ecclesiastical forces from far away whose authority is vaguely understood and whose whims seem as arbitrary as nature. At one point the animals of the islands weep in apparent despair, which phenomenon is explained as follows: “Just like us, they sense that they’re the property of this land and the prisoners, perhaps, of the sea, the water, and the salt.â€? The islands and the book are built by the human struggle against all these constraints, and both are ultimately as rude and beautiful as the paintings in the caves at Lascaux.… (mere)